Well, the long eclipse is over. Producer Mary McGrath and I are back in the radio game with a new show about everything, titled Open Source.

Open Source will launch Monday, May 30, on two of the top ten markets: WGBH-FM in Boston and KUOW in Seattle,airing Monday through Thursday at7 p.m.Starting July 4, Public Radio International will feed the program live nationwide, marketing Open Source to 727 affiliate stations for broadcast and simulcast streaming. We will also be podcasting the show, and archiving it on our site.

Open Source, unlike any other radio show, is making the show blog a centerpiece of the enterprise.The blog will feature posts from and about guests, callers, topics, the host and show producers.It will make a point of inviting listeners to “become a source” with their calls, emails, and audio posts.With this aggressive conversation across broadcast and Internet platforms, we are dedicated to making the Open Source site a major node in the blogosphere.

Yes, we have grand ambitions here. As David Weinberger commented yesterday in his JOHO blog:

Check us out at our work-in-progress blog where our blogger-in-chief Brendan Greeley and a brilliant young staff–Katherine Bidwell, David Miller, Robin Amer, Chelsea Merz–are reporting the daily adventures.

NEW YORK: There’s more than a whiff of Caesarism in mid-town this week, and a lot of the convention Republicans are high on it. You catch some of it on TV: the rigid scripting, the air of reverence around Bushes young and old, the endless strumming of war themes, the laugh-out-loud foolishness of the rhetorical over-reaching–First Lady Laura Bush’s remark, for example, that her husband had liberated 50-million people around the world… that the happy schoolgirls of Afghanistan are now safely back at their desks.

What you don’t see on TV is the first impression on the street: the militarization of Manhattan. Cops as far as the eye can see; cops in riot gear, truncheons at the ready; cops in cars; cops on horseback; Jersey barriers blocking the great avenues; all-night floodlighting around Madison Square Garden; anti-riot orange plastic police netting in which even I got wrapped briefly on my first casual stroll through Times Square last Sunday afternoon. One of the safest cities in the world seems to revel in the notion that it is under siege. Which brings me to the theme: is it too late to frame this election game of 2004 as a choice: Empire or Republic? These Republicans in convention assembled are unabashedly the party of empire. The grand old party of Main Street–of “church ushers, undertakers… surgeons, Pullman porters, head nurses and the fat sons of rich fathers” in Norman Mailer’s 1960 account–is now the party of enthusiastic imperialists, and probably ought to be renamed. The Democrats under John Kerry’s charge have cast themselves as more cautious, more responsible, more reluctant stewards of the same universal, earth-and-space empire. Yet most of the people I know would just like to get our country back–“a republic,” as Ben Franklin said, “if you can keep it.” … My commonsense definition of a republic is a free society that is, and feels itself to be, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” My definition of the modern American condition is the enthronement “of the foreign oil, by the military, for the corporate class.” The deep dread among all sorts of people I know is quite simply that “since 9/11, our country has undergone a transformation from republic to empire that may well prove irreversible,” as Chalmers Johnson summed it up in The Sorrows of Empire. “As militarism, the arrogance of power, and the euphemisms required to justify imperialism inevitably conflict with America’s democratic structure of government and distort its culture and basic values, I fear that we will lose our country.” Three key points, please, to get started. First, these symptoms and sorrows of empire are out there in plain sight, and easy to enumerate. Second, plain-speaking thinkers well to the right and others well to the left describe the crisis in almost exactly the same terms. Susan Sontag sounds shockingly like Pat Buchanan. On the empire issue, Norman Mailer, who calls himself a left-conservative these days, which seems to mean he’s been drifting to the right, resonates with the ex-Republican Kevin Phillips, heading left. Stranger still, the Scots historian and champion of empire, Niall Ferguson, now meets himself head-on in the ruins of our imperial overstretch in Iraq. Ferguson’s hubris confronts Ferguson’s nemesis. He writes: “The American empire has a big problem. Not only do Americans not recognize the true character of their own predicament—that un-splendid isolation against which Lord Salisbury warned the Victorian imperialists. The rest of the world now regards the United States as not just an empire but now an evil empire.” And third, it’s only the vast, increasingly mindless middle of our media and our politics that refuses to engage the empire question–which refuses, that is, to acknowledge the sad, sore, sinking, pit-of-the-stomach sense that the best of our old American birthright is in jeopardy. American imperial adventure is not, of course, brand new. What is eternally new about empire, however, is the erasure of memory, the air of innocence, the self-deception that says the emergency or the opportunity at hand is unique and inescapable. In The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the widely respected journalist John Judis writes: “Only a president deeply ignorant of the past and what it teaches could journey to the Philippines in 2003 and declare that a century ago Americans had ‘liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.’ America’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq wasn’t, of course, a direct result of this misreading of the past. If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s leading neoconservative, had been aware of the brutal war America had fought in the Philippines, or of Wilson’s misadventures in Mexico, or of the blighted history of Western imperialism in the Mideast, they might still have invaded Iraq. But they also might have had second or even third or fourth thoughts about what Bush, echoing… the imperialists of a century ago, would call ‘a historic opportunity to change the world.'” So what are the critical symptoms of the imperial affliction? Chalmers Johnson’s list starts from the decision not to demobilize at the end of the Cold War. In the Bush I and Clinton administrations, he writes, we managed to stick ourselves with a permanent force of a million soldiers and agents overseas, 12 carrier groups at sea, and more than 700 American bases outside the United States, including 234 military golf courses and the Gulfstream jets to get the generals to the tee on time. In Bush II we have declared ourselves a New Rome, unbound by law, allies or constraints on military force. We have claimed to legitimize “preventive war” and normalized Orwellian phrases like “regime change,” “collateral damage” and “illegal combatants.” In blatant violation of the United States Constitution, Johnson continues, we have allowed vast appropriations for the Pentagon and the CIA to be hidden from public inspection. We have tolerated the presidential preemption of Congress in the declaration of war–not just the war on Iraq but the eternal war to nail the last terrorist on earth. And we seem to have abandoned Thomas Jefferson’s “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Because empire always expresses itself in culture as well as politics, I would add to my list of current symptoms: a public psychology of domination and humiliation, made visible in the pictures from Abu Ghraib; a political pretense of permanent emergency; a quasi-official theology of sectarian militancy, starting at home; a popular culture of witless borrowing and vulgarity; and a popular journalism (in the radio rant style) of hysteria, commercialism and partisan propaganda. Empire commits us to the continual violation of our own standards. It enshrines hypocrisy as the norm. Here is the Pat Buchanan version: “Empire requires an unshakeable belief in the superiority of one’s own race, religion, and civilization and an iron resolve to fight to impose that faith and civilization upon other peoples. We are not that kind of people. Never have been. Americans, who preach the equality of all races, creeds, and cultures, are, de facto, poor imperialists. When we attempt an imperial role as in the Philippines or Iraq, we invariably fall into squabbling over whether a republic should be imposing its ideology on another nation. A crusade for democracy is a contradiction in terms.” Susan Sontag renders her own grim judgment and warning: “It’s really the end of the republic and the beginning of the empire,” she says, likening former president Bill Clinton to Julius Caesar (who crossed the Rubicon in defiance of the Roman Senate) and Bush to Augustus. “I think as long as the U.S.A. has only one political party — the Republican party, a branch of which calls itself the Democratic party — we aren’t going to see a change of the current policy.” In his new book, the rightist Pat Buchanan hones what sounds to me like the unspoken leftist critique: First, on the unilateralist Bush Doctrine issued in September, 2002. It is “a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics,” Buchanan writes. “This is democratic imperialism. This will bleed, bankrupt and isolate this republic. This overthrows the wisdom of the Founding Fathers about what America should be all about.” Second, on the war on Iraq: “…listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden’s prophecy as to what we were about. We won the war in three weeks — and we may have lost the Islamic world for a generation.” And third, on the war on terrorism: “U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were we not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here… Terrorism is the price of empire. If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire.” In a remarkable feat of newspaper journalism, Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution saw the imperial design in the Bush invasion of Iraq six months before it happened. They didn’t have an exit strategy, he concluded, because they didn’t intend to leave! In the Nation magazine’s GOP convention issue, Jonathan Schell wonders if what we’ve come to is an imperial policy without an empire in fact: “…the recent fortunes of the United States have been anything but triumphal. The President’s policies have failed to check the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The entire ‘axis of evil,’ consisting, according to the President, of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, continues to defy his administration in one way or another. In Iraq, the Marines are now at war with the Shiite community the United States supposedly came to save. North Korea has allegedly become a nuclear power, and Iran seems to be heading that way. The traditional alliances of the United States have been shaken. After 9/11, editorialists asked, ‘Why do they hate us?’ Whatever the reasons, ‘they’ have multiplied to include most of the world.” Schell continues: “In the twentieth century, the peoples of the earth insisted on taking charge of their own countries. Their rebellions were successful against all empires, from the British to the Soviet, every one of which has fallen. “In the face of nuclear stalemate at the apex of the global system and universal rebellion at the base, can any imperial project now succeed? What we may in fact be witnessing is not just a contest between an American empire and its particular colonial targets but a final showdown between the imperial idea and what I like to call an unconquerable world, meaning a world that has the will and the means to reject any imperial yoke. “Is the United States possibly an imperial power that does not quite possess an empire? Is the American ’empire’ a colossal leftover from a vanishing age?” We all seem to know somehow that our country stands in the valley of the shadow of something awful in this 2004 election. At the heart of our anxiety is not our vulnerability in the world but our power. It’s this threshhold of empire, which may only be crossed once, that makes this perhaps a world-historical moment. So how do we put the empire question at the center of the presidential debate?

My commonsense definition of a republic is a free society that is, and feels itself to be, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” My definition of the modern American condition is the enthronement “of the foreign oil, by the military, for the corporate class.”

First, these symptoms and sorrows of empire are out there in plain sight, and easy to enumerate.

Second, plain-speaking thinkers well to the right and others well to the left describe the crisis in almost exactly the same terms. Susan Sontag sounds shockingly like Pat Buchanan. On the empire issue, http://www.amconmag.com/12_2/mailer.html” target=”undefined”>Norman Mailerhttp://www.americandynasty.net/excerpts.htm” target=”undefined”>Kevin Phillipshttp://www.nrbookservice.com/bookpage.asp?prod_cd=c6480” target=”undefined”>Niall Ferguson

http://slate.msn.com/id/2099751/” target=”undefined”>”The American empire has a big problem. Not only do Americans not recognize the true character of their own predicament—that un-splendid isolation against which Lord Salisbury warned the Victorian imperialists. The rest of the world now regards the United States as not just an empire but now an evil empire.”

And third, it’s only the vast, increasingly mindless middle of our media and our politics that refuses to engage the empire question–which refuses, that is, to acknowledge the sad, sore, sinking, pit-of-the-stomach sense that the best of our old American birthright is in jeopardy.

American imperial adventure is not, of course, brand new. What is eternally new about empire, however, is the erasure of memory, the air of innocence, the self-deception that says the emergency or the opportunity at hand is unique and inescapable. In http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=134603” target=”undefined”>The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson

“Only a president deeply ignorant of the past and what it teaches could journey to the Philippines in 2003 and declare that a century ago Americans had ‘liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.’ America’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq wasn’t, of course, a direct result of this misreading of the past. If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s leading neoconservative, had been aware of the brutal war America had fought in the Philippines, or of Wilson’s misadventures in Mexico, or of the blighted history of Western imperialism in the Mideast, they might still have invaded Iraq. But they also might have had second or even third or fourth thoughts about what Bush, echoing… the imperialists of a century ago, would call ‘a historic opportunity to change the world.'”

In blatant violation of the United States Constitution, Johnson continues, we have allowed vast appropriations for the Pentagon and the CIA to be hidden from public inspection. We have tolerated the presidential preemption of Congress in the declaration of war–not just the war on Iraq but the eternal war to nail the last terrorist on earth. And we seem to have abandoned Thomas Jefferson’s “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

Because empire always expresses itself in culture as well as politics, I would add to my list of current symptoms: a public psychology of domination and humiliation, made visible in the pictures from Abu Ghraib; a political pretense of permanent emergency; a quasi-official theology of sectarian militancy, starting at home; a popular culture of witless borrowing and vulgarity; and a popular journalism (in the radio rant style) of hysteria, commercialism and partisan propaganda.

“Empire requires an unshakeable belief in the superiority of one’s own race, religion, and civilization and an iron resolve to fight to impose that faith and civilization upon other peoples. We are not that kind of people. Never have been. Americans, who preach the equality of all races, creeds, and cultures, are, de facto, poor imperialists. When we attempt an imperial role as in the Philippines or Iraq, we invariably fall into squabbling over whether a republic should be imposing its ideology on another nation. A crusade for democracy is a contradiction in terms.”

First, on the unilateralist Bush Doctrine issued in September, 2002. It is “a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics,” Buchanan

Second, on the war on Iraq: “…listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden’s prophecy as to what we were about. We won the war in three weeks — and we may have lost the Islamic world for a generation.”

And third, on the war on terrorism: “U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were we not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here… Terrorism is the price of empire. If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire.”

“…the recent fortunes of the United States have been anything but triumphal. The President’s policies have failed to check the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The entire ‘axis of evil,’ consisting, according to the President, of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, continues to defy his administration in one way or another. In Iraq, the Marines are now at war with the Shiite community the United States supposedly came to save. North Korea has allegedly become a nuclear power, and Iran seems to be heading that way. The traditional alliances of the United States have been shaken. After 9/11, editorialists asked, ‘Why do they hate us?’ Whatever the reasons, ‘they’ have multiplied to include most of the world.”

Schell continues:

“In the twentieth century, the peoples of the earth insisted on taking charge of their own countries. Their rebellions were successful against all empires, from the British to the Soviet, every one of which has fallen.

“In the face of nuclear stalemate at the apex of the global system and universal rebellion at the base, can any imperial project now succeed? What we may in fact be witnessing is not just a contest between an American empire and its particular colonial targets but a final showdown between the imperial idea and what I like to call an unconquerable world, meaning a world that has the will and the means to reject any imperial yoke.

“Is the United States possibly an imperial power that does not quite possess an empire? Is the American ’empire’ a colossal leftover from a vanishing age?”

We all seem to know somehow that our country stands in the valley of the shadow of something awful in this 2004 election. At the heart of our anxiety is not our vulnerability in the world but our power. It’s this threshhold of empire, which may only be crossed once, that makes this perhaps a world-historical moment. So how do we put the empire question at the center of the presidential debate?

NEW YORK: There’s more than a whiff of Caesarism in mid-town this week, and a lot of the convention Republicans are high on it. You catch some of it on TV: the rigid scripting, the air of reverence around Bushes young and old, the endless strumming of war themes, the laugh-out-loud foolishness of the rhetorical over-reaching–First Lady Laura Bush’s remark, for example, that her husband had liberated 50-million people around the world… that the happy schoolgirls of Afghanistan are now safely back at their desks.

What you don’t see on TV is the first impression on the street: the militarization of Manhattan. Cops as far as the eye can see; cops in riot gear, truncheons at the ready; cops in cars; cops on horseback; Jersey barriers blocking the great avenues; all-night floodlighting around Madison Square Garden; anti-riot orange plastic police netting in which even I got wrapped briefly on my first casual stroll through Times Square last Sunday afternoon. One of the safest cities in the world seems to revel in the notion that it is under siege.

Which brings me to the theme: is it too late to frame this election game of 2004 as a choice: Empire or Republic?

My commonsense definition of a republic is a free society that is, and feels itself to be, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” My definition of the modern American condition is the enthronement “of the foreign oil, by the military, for the corporate class.”

First, these symptoms and sorrows of empire are out there in plain sight, and easy to enumerate.

Second, plain-speaking thinkers well to the right and others well to the left describe the crisis in almost exactly the same terms. Susan Sontag sounds shockingly like Pat Buchanan. On the empire issue, http://www.amconmag.com/12_2/mailer.html” target=”undefined”>Norman Mailerhttp://www.americandynasty.net/excerpts.htm” target=”undefined”>Kevin Phillipshttp://www.nrbookservice.com/bookpage.asp?prod_cd=c6480” target=”undefined”>Niall Ferguson

http://slate.msn.com/id/2099751/” target=”undefined”>”The American empire has a big problem. Not only do Americans not recognize the true character of their own predicament—that un-splendid isolation against which Lord Salisbury warned the Victorian imperialists. The rest of the world now regards the United States as not just an empire but now an evil empire.”

And third, it’s only the vast, increasingly mindless middle of our media and our politics that refuses to engage the empire question–which refuses, that is, to acknowledge the sad, sore, sinking, pit-of-the-stomach sense that the best of our old American birthright is in jeopardy.

American imperial adventure is not, of course, brand new. What is eternally new about empire, however, is the erasure of memory, the air of innocence, the self-deception that says the emergency or the opportunity at hand is unique and inescapable. In http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=134603” target=”undefined”>The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson

“Only a president deeply ignorant of the past and what it teaches could journey to the Philippines in 2003 and declare that a century ago Americans had ‘liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.’ America’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq wasn’t, of course, a direct result of this misreading of the past. If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s leading neoconservative, had been aware of the brutal war America had fought in the Philippines, or of Wilson’s misadventures in Mexico, or of the blighted history of Western imperialism in the Mideast, they might still have invaded Iraq. But they also might have had second or even third or fourth thoughts about what Bush, echoing… the imperialists of a century ago, would call ‘a historic opportunity to change the world.'”

In blatant violation of the United States Constitution, Johnson continues, we have allowed vast appropriations for the Pentagon and the CIA to be hidden from public inspection. We have tolerated the presidential preemption of Congress in the declaration of war–not just the war on Iraq but the eternal war to nail the last terrorist on earth. And we seem to have abandoned Thomas Jefferson’s “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

Because empire always expresses itself in culture as well as politics, I would add to my list of current symptoms: a public psychology of domination and humiliation, made visible in the pictures from Abu Ghraib; a political pretense of permanent emergency; a quasi-official theology of sectarian militancy, starting at home; a popular culture of witless borrowing and vulgarity; and a popular journalism (in the radio rant style) of hysteria, commercialism and partisan propaganda.

“Empire requires an unshakeable belief in the superiority of one’s own race, religion, and civilization and an iron resolve to fight to impose that faith and civilization upon other peoples. We are not that kind of people. Never have been. Americans, who preach the equality of all races, creeds, and cultures, are, de facto, poor imperialists. When we attempt an imperial role as in the Philippines or Iraq, we invariably fall into squabbling over whether a republic should be imposing its ideology on another nation. A crusade for democracy is a contradiction in terms.”

First, on the unilateralist Bush Doctrine issued in September, 2002. It is “a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics,” Buchanan

Second, on the war on Iraq: “…listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden’s prophecy as to what we were about. We won the war in three weeks — and we may have lost the Islamic world for a generation.”

And third, on the war on terrorism: “U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were we not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here… Terrorism is the price of empire. If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire.”

“…the recent fortunes of the United States have been anything but triumphal. The President’s policies have failed to check the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The entire ‘axis of evil,’ consisting, according to the President, of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, continues to defy his administration in one way or another. In Iraq, the Marines are now at war with the Shiite community the United States supposedly came to save. North Korea has allegedly become a nuclear power, and Iran seems to be heading that way. The traditional alliances of the United States have been shaken. After 9/11, editorialists asked, ‘Why do they hate us?’ Whatever the reasons, ‘they’ have multiplied to include most of the world.”

Schell continues:

“In the twentieth century, the peoples of the earth insisted on taking charge of their own countries. Their rebellions were successful against all empires, from the British to the Soviet, every one of which has fallen.

“In the face of nuclear stalemate at the apex of the global system and universal rebellion at the base, can any imperial project now succeed? What we may in fact be witnessing is not just a contest between an American empire and its particular colonial targets but a final showdown between the imperial idea and what I like to call an unconquerable world, meaning a world that has the will and the means to reject any imperial yoke.

“Is the United States possibly an imperial power that does not quite possess an empire? Is the American ’empire’ a colossal leftover from a vanishing age?”

We all seem to know somehow that our country stands in the valley of the shadow of something awful in this 2004 election. At the heart of our anxiety is not our vulnerability in the world but our power. It’s this threshhold of empire, which may only be crossed once, that makes this perhaps a world-historical moment. So how do we put the empire question at the center of the presidential debate?My commonsense definition of a republic is a free society that is, and feels itself to be, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” My definition of the modern American condition is the enthronement “of the foreign oil, by the military, for the corporate class.”

First, these symptoms and sorrows of empire are out there in plain sight, and easy to enumerate.

Second, plain-speaking thinkers well to the right and others well to the left describe the crisis in almost exactly the same terms. Susan Sontag sounds shockingly like Pat Buchanan. On the empire issue, http://www.amconmag.com/12_2/mailer.html” target=”undefined”>Norman Mailerhttp://www.americandynasty.net/excerpts.htm” target=”undefined”>Kevin Phillipshttp://www.nrbookservice.com/bookpage.asp?prod_cd=c6480” target=”undefined”>Niall Ferguson

http://slate.msn.com/id/2099751/” target=”undefined”>”The American empire has a big problem. Not only do Americans not recognize the true character of their own predicament—that un-splendid isolation against which Lord Salisbury warned the Victorian imperialists. The rest of the world now regards the United States as not just an empire but now an evil empire.”

And third, it’s only the vast, increasingly mindless middle of our media and our politics that refuses to engage the empire question–which refuses, that is, to acknowledge the sad, sore, sinking, pit-of-the-stomach sense that the best of our old American birthright is in jeopardy.

American imperial adventure is not, of course, brand new. What is eternally new about empire, however, is the erasure of memory, the air of innocence, the self-deception that says the emergency or the opportunity at hand is unique and inescapable. In http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=134603” target=”undefined”>The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson

“Only a president deeply ignorant of the past and what it teaches could journey to the Philippines in 2003 and declare that a century ago Americans had ‘liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.’ America’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq wasn’t, of course, a direct result of this misreading of the past. If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s leading neoconservative, had been aware of the brutal war America had fought in the Philippines, or of Wilson’s misadventures in Mexico, or of the blighted history of Western imperialism in the Mideast, they might still have invaded Iraq. But they also might have had second or even third or fourth thoughts about what Bush, echoing… the imperialists of a century ago, would call ‘a historic opportunity to change the world.'”

In blatant violation of the United States Constitution, Johnson continues, we have allowed vast appropriations for the Pentagon and the CIA to be hidden from public inspection. We have tolerated the presidential preemption of Congress in the declaration of war–not just the war on Iraq but the eternal war to nail the last terrorist on earth. And we seem to have abandoned Thomas Jefferson’s “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

Because empire always expresses itself in culture as well as politics, I would add to my list of current symptoms: a public psychology of domination and humiliation, made visible in the pictures from Abu Ghraib; a political pretense of permanent emergency; a quasi-official theology of sectarian militancy, starting at home; a popular culture of witless borrowing and vulgarity; and a popular journalism (in the radio rant style) of hysteria, commercialism and partisan propaganda.

“Empire requires an unshakeable belief in the superiority of one’s own race, religion, and civilization and an iron resolve to fight to impose that faith and civilization upon other peoples. We are not that kind of people. Never have been. Americans, who preach the equality of all races, creeds, and cultures, are, de facto, poor imperialists. When we attempt an imperial role as in the Philippines or Iraq, we invariably fall into squabbling over whether a republic should be imposing its ideology on another nation. A crusade for democracy is a contradiction in terms.”

First, on the unilateralist Bush Doctrine issued in September, 2002. It is “a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics,” Buchanan

Second, on the war on Iraq: “…listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden’s prophecy as to what we were about. We won the war in three weeks — and we may have lost the Islamic world for a generation.”

And third, on the war on terrorism: “U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were we not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here… Terrorism is the price of empire. If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire.”

“…the recent fortunes of the United States have been anything but triumphal. The President’s policies have failed to check the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The entire ‘axis of evil,’ consisting, according to the President, of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, continues to defy his administration in one way or another. In Iraq, the Marines are now at war with the Shiite community the United States supposedly came to save. North Korea has allegedly become a nuclear power, and Iran seems to be heading that way. The traditional alliances of the United States have been shaken. After 9/11, editorialists asked, ‘Why do they hate us?’ Whatever the reasons, ‘they’ have multiplied to include most of the world.”

Schell continues:

“In the twentieth century, the peoples of the earth insisted on taking charge of their own countries. Their rebellions were successful against all empires, from the British to the Soviet, every one of which has fallen.

“In the face of nuclear stalemate at the apex of the global system and universal rebellion at the base, can any imperial project now succeed? What we may in fact be witnessing is not just a contest between an American empire and its particular colonial targets but a final showdown between the imperial idea and what I like to call an unconquerable world, meaning a world that has the will and the means to reject any imperial yoke.

“Is the United States possibly an imperial power that does not quite possess an empire? Is the American ’empire’ a colossal leftover from a vanishing age?”

We all seem to know somehow that our country stands in the valley of the shadow of something awful in this 2004 election. At the heart of our anxiety is not our vulnerability in the world but our power. It’s this threshhold of empire, which may only be crossed once, that makes this perhaps a world-historical moment. So how do we put the empire question at the center of the presidential debate?

NEW YORK: There’s more than a whiff of Caesarism in mid-town this week, and a lot of the convention Republicans are high on it.

You catch some of it on TV: the rigid scripting, the air of reverence around Bushes young and old, the endless strumming of war themes, the laugh-out-loud foolishness of the rhetorical over-reaching–First Lady Laura Bush’s remark, for example, that her husband had liberated 50-million people around the world… that the happy schoolgirls of Afghanistan are now safely back at their desks.

What you don’t see on TV is the first impression on the street: the militarization of Manhattan. Cops as far as the eye can see; cops in riot gear, truncheons at the ready; cops in cars; cops on horseback; Jersey barriers blocking the great avenues; all-night floodlighting around Madison Square Garden; anti-riot orange plastic police netting in which even I got wrapped briefly on my first casual stroll through Times Square last Sunday afternoon. One of the safest cities in the world seems to revel in the notion that it is under siege.

Which brings me to the theme: is it too late to frame this election game of 2004 as a choice: Empire or Republic?

These Republicans in convention assembled are unabashedly the party of empire. The grand old party of Main Street–of “church ushers, undertakers… surgeons, Pullman porters, head nurses and the fat sons of rich fathers” in Norman Mailer’s 1960 account–is now the party of enthusiastic imperialists, and probably ought to be renamed.

The Democrats under John Kerry’s charge have cast themselves as more cautious, more responsible, more reluctant stewards of the same universal, earth-and-space empire.

Yet most of the people I know would just like to get our country back–“a republic,” as Ben Franklin said, “if you can keep it.” My commonsense definition of a republic is a free society that is, and feels itself to be, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” My definition of the modern American condition is the enthronement “of the foreign oil, by the military, for the corporate class.”

The deep dread among all sorts of people I know is quite simply that “since 9/11, our country has undergone a transformation from republic to empire that may well prove irreversible,” as Chalmers Johnson summed it up in The Sorrows of Empire. “As militarism, the arrogance of power, and the euphemisms required to justify imperialism inevitably conflict with America’s democratic structure of government and distort its culture and basic values, I fear that we will lose our country.”

Three key points, please, to get started.

First, these symptoms and sorrows of empire are out there in plain sight, and easy to enumerate.

Second, plain-speaking thinkers well to the right and others well to the left describe the crisis in almost exactly the same terms. Susan Sontag sounds shockingly like Pat Buchanan. On the empire issue, Norman Mailer, who calls himself a left-conservative these days, which seems to mean he’s been drifting to the right, resonates with the ex-Republican Kevin Phillips, heading left. Stranger still, the Scots historian and champion of empire, Niall Ferguson, now meets himself head-on in the ruins of our imperial overstretch in Iraq. Ferguson’s hubris confronts Ferguson’s nemesis. He writes:

And third, it’s only the vast, increasingly mindless middle of our media and our politics that refuses to engage the empire question–which refuses, that is, to acknowledge the sad, sore, sinking, pit-of-the-stomach sense that the best of our old American birthright is in jeopardy.

“Only a president deeply ignorant of the past and what it teaches could journey to the Philippines in 2003 and declare that a century ago Americans had ‘liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.’ America’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq wasn’t, of course, a direct result of this misreading of the past. If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s leading neoconservative, had been aware of the brutal war America had fought in the Philippines, or of Wilson’s misadventures in Mexico, or of the blighted history of Western imperialism in the Mideast, they might still have invaded Iraq. But they also might have had second or even third or fourth thoughts about what Bush, echoing… the imperialists of a century ago, would call ‘a historic opportunity to change the world.'”

So what are the critical symptoms of the imperial affliction? Chalmers Johnson’s list starts from the decision not to demobilize at the end of the Cold War. In the Bush I and Clinton administrations, he writes, we managed to stick ourselves with a permanent force of a million soldiers and agents overseas, 12 carrier groups at sea, and more than 700 American bases outside the United States, including 234 military golf courses and the Gulfstream jets to get the generals to the tee on time. In Bush II we have declared ourselves a New Rome, unbound by law, allies or constraints on military force. We have claimed to legitimize “preventive war” and normalized Orwellian phrases like “regime change,” “collateral damage” and “illegal combatants.”

In blatant violation of the United States Constitution, Johnson continues, we have allowed vast appropriations for the Pentagon and the CIA to be hidden from public inspection. We have tolerated the presidential preemption of Congress in the declaration of war–not just the war on Iraq but the eternal war to nail the last terrorist on earth. And we seem to have abandoned Thomas Jefferson’s “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

Because empire always expresses itself in culture as well as politics, I would add to my list of current symptoms: a public psychology of domination and humiliation, made visible in the pictures from Abu Ghraib; a political pretense of permanent emergency; a quasi-official theology of sectarian militancy, starting at home; a popular culture of witless borrowing and vulgarity; and a popular journalism (in the radio rant style) of hysteria, commercialism and partisan propaganda.

Empire commits us to the continual violation of our own standards. It enshrines hypocrisy as the norm. Here is the Pat Buchanan version:

“Empire requires an unshakeable belief in the superiority of one’s own race, religion, and civilization and an iron resolve to fight to impose that faith and civilization upon other peoples. We are not that kind of people. Never have been. Americans, who preach the equality of all races, creeds, and cultures, are, de facto, poor imperialists. When we attempt an imperial role as in the Philippines or Iraq, we invariably fall into squabbling over whether a republic should be imposing its ideology on another nation. A crusade for democracy is a contradiction in terms.”

Susan Sontag renders her own grim judgment and warning: “It’s really the end of the republic and the beginning of the empire,” she says, likening former president Bill Clinton to Julius Caesar (who crossed the Rubicon in defiance of the Roman Senate) and Bush to Augustus. “I think as long as the U.S.A. has only one political party — the Republican party, a branch of which calls itself the Democratic party — we aren’t going to see a change of the current policy.”

In his new book, the rightist Pat Buchanan hones what sounds to me like the unspoken leftist critique:

First, on the unilateralist Bush Doctrine issued in September, 2002. It is “a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics,” Buchanan writes. “This is democratic imperialism. This will bleed, bankrupt and isolate this republic. This overthrows the wisdom of the Founding Fathers about what America should be all about.”

Second, on the war on Iraq: “…listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden’s prophecy as to what we were about. We won the war in three weeks — and we may have lost the Islamic world for a generation.”

And third, on the war on terrorism: “U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were we not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here… Terrorism is the price of empire. If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire.”

In a remarkable feat of newspaper journalism, Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution saw the imperial design in the Bush invasion of Iraq six months before it happened. They didn’t have an exit strategy, he concluded, because they didn’t intend to leave!

In the Nation magazine’s GOP convention issue, Jonathan Schell wonders if what we’ve come to is an imperial policy without an empire in fact:

“…the recent fortunes of the United States have been anything but triumphal. The President’s policies have failed to check the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The entire ‘axis of evil,’ consisting, according to the President, of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, continues to defy his administration in one way or another. In Iraq, the Marines are now at war with the Shiite community the United States supposedly came to save. North Korea has allegedly become a nuclear power, and Iran seems to be heading that way. The traditional alliances of the United States have been shaken. After 9/11, editorialists asked, ‘Why do they hate us?’ Whatever the reasons, ‘they’ have multiplied to include most of the world.”

Schell continues:

“In the twentieth century, the peoples of the earth insisted on taking charge of their own countries. Their rebellions were successful against all empires, from the British to the Soviet, every one of which has fallen.

“In the face of nuclear stalemate at the apex of the global system and universal rebellion at the base, can any imperial project now succeed? What we may in fact be witnessing is not just a contest between an American empire and its particular colonial targets but a final showdown between the imperial idea and what I like to call an unconquerable world, meaning a world that has the will and the means to reject any imperial yoke.

“Is the United States possibly an imperial power that does not quite possess an empire? Is the American ’empire’ a colossal leftover from a vanishing age?”

We all seem to know somehow that our country stands in the valley of the shadow of something awful in this 2004 election. At the heart of our anxiety is not our vulnerability in the world but our power. It’s this threshhold of empire, which may only be crossed once, that makes this perhaps a world-historical moment. So how do we put the empire question at the center of the presidential debate?

Bill Buckley has been a writer and a player to be reckoned with in the Republican tong wars going back to Robert “Mr. Republican” Taft vs. Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. He stood with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan in battle with the Rockefeller faction of the party through the 1970s.

So I asked him: How did the famously divided Republicans–Russell Baker once described them as a bird that was “all wings, and no body”–come to a simulation of unity behind George W. Bush? And just which tree do President Bush and this convention fall out of?

Listen for yourself and judge whether Bill Buckley’s tone suggests triumph or disappointment in his heart of hearts.

“It falls,” he responds to my question, “in the line of a Republican Party not fraught by any serious internal division, or even tension. It’s not Rockefeller vs. Goldwater or Reagan vs. Rockefeller. It is more or less: ‘whose turn is it?’ And in that sense it represents a party that really hasn’t found any missionary excitement of the kind that identifies the leader with a body of thought that’s either gestating or received as common wisdom.

“In other words, I think that the Republican nominee of four years ago and this year is not an exciting ideological figure. He is rather a senior figure who prevailed in traditional ways. I don’t think Mr. Bush will be thought of as a Reagan or a Senator Taft.”

That is not just putting it mildly, I reply, it’s getting it wrong.

I volunteer to Bill Buckley that it seems clear in hindsight that the old casting of Rockefeller “moderates” and Reaganite “extremists” in the Republican party was a basic misconstruction, aided in no small part by the Rockefeller clout in the media and at the New York Times in particular.

In real life we got to know Ronald Reagan as rather a gentle and available Main St. cowboy, a populist for the well-to-do, a phlegmatic character with quasi-isolationist “fortress America” instincts. He was open and clear about his anti-Communist foreign policy. Yes, he was a sneaky bully in Central America, but he was extremely cautious in action otherwise.

It’s the Rockefeller instincts I never stop worrying about. Drawing on the power of oil and Wall Street with the personal entitlement that comes of almost infinite inherited wealth, the Rockefeller instincts are compounded with secrecy, overfamiliarity with nuclear weapons and the CIA, and a possessive outlook on the whole world.

It’s the Rockefeller instincts, I argue, that led the bungling Bush administration into Iraq and fed the fantasy of an easy police action in a far outpost of empire. It’s the old Rockefeller instincts that are still trying to euphemize and legitimize aggressive blunders that Ronald Reagan would never have committed.

Ronald Reagan’s “victory” in the Cold War and his emergence as a hero in Russia and Eastern Europe doubtless inspired George Bush’s crazy dream of being seen someday as the “liberator” of Arab Muslims. But Bush missed the point by a mile. Ronald Reagan never bombed Warsaw or Petersburg or Moscow. He’d have lost the Cold War if he had. And he would surely have cautioned George Bush: Well, son…you won’t win anything of value, even against Saddam Hussein, by bombing the Cradle of Civilization.

I had my own odd epiphany about Ronald Reagan around the time of the Soviet assault on Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, at the start of the 1980 presidential campaign. Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a longtime Rockefeller protege, had posed with a rifle in the Khyber Pass, in effect warning the Russians not even to think about approaching the Persian Gulf. Other old Rockefeller hands, notably Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger, were muttering hints at the same time that the United States might have to use to nuclear weapons to defend our oil lifeline. But Ronald Reagan had an altogether different and explicitly anti-nuclear line. We might have to quarantine Cuba in response to a Russian mischief in the Gulf, Reagan said. But wasn’t it wonderful, he added, that we had more oil under Alaska than existed in all of the Middle East! Reagan was being his fanciful Hollywood self, of course, about that Alaskan oil, but he was also revealing his continental and defensive reflexes about American power, altogether different from Nelson Rockefeller’s. A Bill Buckley anecdote confirms my sentimental weakness for the late Ronnie as a crypto-peacenik: Colin Powell remarked not long ago, Buckley says, that “of all the people he ever worked with, he never ran into anybody who despised nuclear weapons the way Ronald Reagan did.”

I am remembering another epiphany as a New York Times reporter watching Nelson Rockefeller at a bizarre moment in 1976. He was a lame-duck vice president, having been chosen by the accidental President Gerald Ford, then dumped as a running mate in favor of Bob Dole. Late in the 1976 campaign, it was Rockefeller’s awkward and humilitating duty to show Dole around New York State. On a state university campus in Westchester County, students turned out en masse, not to cheer Nelson Rockefeller but to remind the world of his role as governor in the Attica prison massacre in 1971. “Attica, Attica, no matter how you figger, Rocky pulled the trigger,” the students kept chanting, drowning out host Rockefeller and his guest Dole. Finally Rocky, at the end of his rope, gave the kids the finger–first one hand, then two. I called the Times desk in some amazement to say that Nelson Rockefeller was melting down before scores of cameras. But this was a picture that was never to run in the New York Times, and a story not quite fit to be printed in the paper of record. Not about Nelson Rockefeller anyway.

Rockefeller had power beyond imagining. His sway at Times was the least of it, perhaps, but we felt the vibrations, often with a chill of embarrassment. On Rockefeller’s sudden death in his midtown Manhattan apartment in 1979, the marvellous James Reston reduced himself to writing in a page-one obituary appreciation that it was fitting that his friend had died in quiet contemplation of his personal art collection, though it soon developed that in fact Rocky had his fatal heart attack in the saddle with a girlfriend. A great ex-Times reporter, Richard Reeves, tells of a time in the late 1960s when New York was ablaze with race riots and Governor Rockefeller was missing for weeks. Reeves finally located him on World Bank president Eugene Black’s island estate in the Mediterranean, whereupon Black, a member of the Times board, called the Times publisher to say: Governor Rockefeller was not to be disturbed! For the Times I covered Rockefeller’s elevation to the vice presidency in 1974. Dick Reeves’ joke at the time was: “Chris, don’t worry about ‘confict of interest’ issues–Rocky’s putting Venezuela into a blind trust.”

I feel a resonance of that ancient history inside this tight little Bush bubble of a convention in the militarized bunker of Madison Square Garden. The atmosphere in New York feels to me Rockefellerish, in a word. It’s not so much that, as Kevin Phillips has written, “The Bushes’ ties to John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil go back 100 years.” It is rather the impenetrable and impervious arrogance of Bush power. (Kevin Phillips again, on the Bushes: “I get a sense… that this is not a family that has a particularly strong commitment to American democracy. Its sense of how to win elections comes out of a CIA manual, not out of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.”) It is also the deep insulation that most of the institutional media have given President Bush and his runaway misadventure in Iraq.

It’s just a few Republican veterans who say incisively what has happened to their party.

Ron Reagan Jr., for one, in Esquire: “Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken “normal” mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on… My father, acting roles excepted, never pretended to be anyone but himself. His Republican party, furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model, with its cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts. …Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and ill-advised militarism, there is a question of trust. George W. Bush and his allies don’t trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust them?”

Kevin Phillips, for another: “as far as I’m concerned, what the Bushes represent is just totally at loggerheads with everything from Abraham Lincoln down to McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, to Eisenhower who warned about the military-industrial complex.”

And, clearest of all Pat Buchanan: “Under the rubric of conservatism, the Republican party of Bush I and II has been reinventing itself into what conservatives would have once recognized as a Rockefeller party reciting Reaganite rhetoric.”

In a forthcoming book of which I’ve seen only excerpts, WHERE THE RIGHT WENT WRONG: How Neoconservatives Subverted The Reagan Revolution And Hijacked the Bush Presidency, Buchanan forecasts: “[A] civil war is going to break out inside the Republican Party along the old trench lines of the Goldwater-Rockefeller wars of the 1960s, a war for the heart and soul and future of the party for the new century.”

The issue in that civil war, Pat, will be Empire. But that is a subject for another day.

Listen up. It’s not for the squeamish, this business of looking closely at the Bush family definition of “what it takes” to succeed in politics. “You know, the family is ferocious from start to finish,” says my foremost living authority. Richard Ben Cramer is the author of the classic What It Takes about the candidates who did and didn’t have it in 1988: especially Richard Gephardt, Bob Dole, Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis and George H. W. Bush.

Ben Cramer is a reporter like no other I know. A sponge of nuance and off-hand remarks, he seemed to have the run of the Bush estate in that ’88 campaign, and he put it all in the book, with the bark on. The Bush family model, he recalls, was “Poppy” Bush’s maternal grandfather, George Herbert “Pop” Walker, who gave the H. W. and then the W. to the Presidents Bush. Pop Walker was “as hard a chunk of iron as ever came out of the Midwest,” Ben Cramer reminds me in conversation. “They were a family of strivers,” he says. “The whole image that the Washington press corps came down with about the Bushes–of New England gentility–doesn’t quite fit. The joke in the family was about those genteel New Englanders. The ethic of the family was: ‘we’re not like them.'”

George W. Bush was nicknamed “Junior,” not “Dubya,” in that ’88 campaign, in Richard Ben Cramer’s peerless account. He was the beloved bad boy in the family, nasty with the vice presidential staff, and ever in league with attack dog Lee Atwater among the campaign tacticians. The “Senator Straddle” ad against Bob Dole in the New Hampshire primary of 1988 was a tarbrush tipping point for the Bushes. The candidate winced at what he knew was borderline unscrupulousness in the ad, but Roger Ailes & Co. told him it was precisely what was required to undo Bush’s defeat in Iowa and to croak Bob Dole, all of which it did. The “what it takes” question had been answered, once and for all.

Richard Ben Cramer segues to the 2004 campaign: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” he chuckles. “George W. will do what it takes, and ‘Senator Straddle’ is an ad that may well show up against Kerry. They’re going to take him to the cleaners if they possibly can.” Expect more Swift Boat ads. “Yes, you’ll see more of this,” Ben Cramer says.

“W is a wonderful guy to sit with,” Ben Cramer observes, “but he’s very decided. He’s not working out his plans. He’s executing them. He is a man of execution. He will order his world to exactly what the plan is, and he doesn’t cavil about executing it.”

Richard Ben Cramer has more than presidential races in his notebook. He caught the roaring fishing genius of Ted Williams in an Esquire profile a decade ago, and wrote a heartbreaking biography of Joe DiMaggio. More to the point, his new book this summer, How Israel Lost: The Four Questions, is a densely reported cri de coeur about the country Ben Cramer thought he understood, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting in 1979. “I went to do the book about Israel and the Palestinians,” he tells me, “because I was reading stories I couldn’t reconcile with the country I knew.” What had happened to Israel, he found, was that the occupation of Arab lands won in the 1967 war had “subsumed the country” over 37 years. “Israel’s preoccupation is the occupation,” he says. “The whole society is organized around it.” It’s a process and a mentality, Ben Cramer feels, that is engulfing American politics as well.

“I think there are a lot of dots to be connected,” Ben Cramer continues eagerly. “Let me tell you a little about W,” he says. “He’s a guy who gets his information face to face. He listens to the people he can sit down with. He listens to people he likes. And the only guy in the entire Middle East conflict that he does like and he does listen to is Sharon.” Ben Cramer does not hold that Sharon talked Bush into the Iraq war–only that the two leaders (who love to banter, Ben Cramer says, like a couple of old farmers about calving and rain on their respective ranches) are both desperately deep in comparable quagmires. We are seeing, Ben Cramer says, that “American troops will do things we never thought we would see them do. Just as in Israel, the occupation has its own momentum and its own ethic, and it’s an ethic that inevitably corrupts the occupiers as well as the occupied.”

Connecting some more dots, back to our US presidential decision. Neither George Bush nor John Kerry, Ben Cramer says, “has distinguished himself for clarity or toughness” on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. “They seem to be in a contest as to who can woo the established Jewish organizations with more bloodthirsty rhetoric about Arafat.” Bush’s view is more or less Sharon’s view, going back to 1948. John Kerry has at least a chance to start fresh. Ben Cramer says: “I think that bitter experience will have to teach [Kerry] that he cannot equate being a friend of Israel with being a friend of Sharon. The current politics of Israel is so twisted, the country is unable to act in its own interest. So if you are trying to put the US on a policy of agreeing with Israeli policy, it’s a dead end for the US and for Israel.”

Here, then, in Richard Ben Cramer’s resonant, nicotine-stained delivery that I’ve always found compelling, is the hard judgment that makes our conventional wisemen and politicians quiver. “The president who’s going to get something done,” Ben Cramer concludes, “is probably going to be regarded, at least at first, as some kind of terrible anti-Semite or terrible enemy of the Jewish people and of Israel. He’s going to have to take a lot of heat,” a lot more heat even than Richard Ben Cramer has taken for his new book.

“Chris,” he says, “there’s only one way this story in Palestine can come out. There are two people. There are going to be two countries… It’s not going to work otherwise. It will never finish otherwise. And that’s not good for them. That’s not good for us. And that’s not good for the world as a whole.” Listen here.

Listen up: The conversations here are with William F. Buckley and Ron Rosenbaum–the first trying stylishly to obscure, the second earnestly to decipher, the strangest, almost unmentionable development in our politics: that the presidential campaign rivals George Walker Bush and John Forbes Kerry were each and both inducted, two years apart, into the most secret and powerful of the Yale senior societies, Skull and Bones. We would not believe such a story unfolding anyplace else in the world–in Zimbabwe, say, or Turkey, or China. Surely the response would be: are they kidding themselves about their “democracy”? Or are they kidding us?

Bush-Cheney in 2000 was the first “all-oil” ticket in our history, though only a few, like Kevin Phillips, got the joke at the time. Bush v. Kerry is the first “all Bones” contest. And again we don’t know how to talk about it. The candidates will be no help. Bonesmen like Bush and Kerry are obliged to leave any room in which their fellowship is discussed. It’s “too secret to talk about,” as President Bush told Tim Russert on Meet the Press last winter. But can the rest of us come to some understanding here? Does Bones stand for satanism? for undergraduate silliness? for some subtler symptoms of democratic disease?

Partial self-disclosure here: I was tapped in the Spring of 1961 into the Wolf’s Head Society at Yale, which stands in relation to Skull and Bones roughly as the Boston Red Sox stand in relation to the New York Yankees, or perhaps vice versa. We have had our championship seasons. Wolf’s Head has had its share of Tafts and Pillsburys, hockey captains and famous authors , like Stephen Vincent Benet. Yale presidents Whitney Griswold and Benno Schmidt were Wolves. So are Chip McGrath of The New York Times and Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker. Also the Palestinian scholar now at Columbia, Rashid Khalidi, and the New York activist and sometime candidate Lew Lehrman. So we are not an invisible or entirely undistinguished lot. Yet some of us find the public presumption of these Bones guys astonishing.

I’ve never much cared whether they wrestled in the nude at Yale, or whether patriarch Prescott Bush actually stole Geronimo’s own skull and brought it to the Bones mausoleum on High Street in New Haven. Every boy, as Bill Buckley agreed, is entitled to a few secrets from his tree-hut days. And still I have three major misgivings about the Bones overgrowth in politics.

First, the early accreditation without merit. It is Nick Lemann’s coinage that three kinds of people make it to the upper reaches of the American meritocracy: Mandarins, Lifers and Talents. Mandarins are the ones who got their tickets punched at the right institutions–Bill Clinton (Georgetown, Oxford, Yale Law) is the perfect type–with the ultimate seal of the Rhodes Scholarship. Lifers are the guys who make it up through the corporation, or the U.S. Senate, or the Army with faithful time in grade. Bob Dole, Joe Lieberman, Colin Powell and perhaps Dick Cheney could be described as Lifers. Talents (the saving grace of the open American way) are the men and women who come out of nowhere, with Moxie and something to say or do. This is of course the only rule in jazz, sports and show biz. Eddie Murphy is pure Talent. So is Ross Perot. So was Ronald Reagan. So perhaps is John Edwards. So also Arnold Schwarzenegger, apparently. We’ll see. There are mixed types, too. I put myself among the many people I know who are really Mandarins but pretend (or are practicing) to be Talents. I think of John Kerry as a Mandarin and a Lifer, both. John McCain looks like a hybrid Lifer and Talent. But George Bush a Parody Mandarin, who got his ticket punched at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, but never did the work. As I said to Bill Buckley, Bush was the kind of guy at Yale–and there were lots of them–of whom we said: “he hasn’t had his first serious thought.” Bush knows full well that he is a joke on the whole game. He told Yale’s graduating seniors in 2001 that he had come back to New Haven to demonstrate that a C student could become president. He added the caution (I’m paraphrasing): don’t drop out of Yale, or flunk out as Dick Cheney did, or you’ll only get to be vice president! George Bush got to be a legacy candidate for President, only because he first succeeded as a legacy candidate for Andover, Yale and Bones. It’s an embarrassment that our politics seems to work the same old way.

Second, Bones means never having to say you’re sorry. I remember Jimmy Breslin observing in 1970–around the time of the Nixon-Kissinger invasion of Cambodia and the gunning down of protesters at Kent State: “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this country–the Berrigan brothers are in jail, and the Bundy brothers are on the street.” Daniel and Philip Berrigan were Catholic priests and militant peaceniks, endlessly in trouble with the law. William (Yale and Bones, 1939) and McGeorge (Yale and Bones, 1940) Bundy were mandarins of intelligence and international policy, up to their necks in the planning and execution of the Vietnam war, and unapologetic till their dying days. Poor Robert McNamara still travels the world, like a wandering Russian monk, trying to understand “what went wrong” with the Vietnam war he ran. It’s an exercise that would never have occurred to the Bundy types. Surely that defiant arrogance has something to do with the lessons of secrecy, blind loyalty and silence they learned in Bones.

Third, the “all Bones” race can be taken as confirmation of too many deeply anti-democratic symptoms in our time of dynasticism (yes, Hillary Clinton), plutocracy, polarization and selection (as opposed to election)– all the nasty forms of elitism that put George Bush–through a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision–into the White House in the first place.

In fairness, let’s hear the case in favor of the Bones tap as the hand of destiny, in one of the great peans to Yale’s society system in general and to Bones in particular:

“It would of course be foolish to judge an individual solely by his society connections, but it would be far less foolish than to judge him solely by the number of prizes, or scholarships, or honors he could lay claim to, as is not infrequently the pratice. To set up any one arbitrary standard whereby to judge character is manifestly unfair, yet, if it is to be done, there is no single test which embraces so many, in making an estimate of a Yale man’s importance, as his share in the society system.“

The lines are from a book titled Four Years at Yale by Lyman H. Bogg, Yale class of 1869, in the dawn of the Gilded Age. Perhaps there is no pithier statement of the case for President Bush’s reelection, though John Kerry could claim the endorsement just as proudly.

So much for what I think. Listen to the experts:

Bill Buckley (Yale 1950) knows all about Skull and Bones from the inside, but of course in our too discreet conversation we did not blurt out the name of the association we were talking about. He was happier speaking of his lifelong admiration for William Sloane Coffin (Yale and Bones, 1949), his opposite number in the right-left politics of the 1960s, and speculating about whatever it was in the New Haven water that produced so many political contenders from the ’60s, when we all thought the action and the “ergs of idealism” were cut of California.

Ron Rosenbaum (Yale 1968), a classmate of President Bush, knows almost all about Skull and Bones from the outside. In his famous investigative piece in Esquire in 1977, Rosenbaum claimed he could actually hear the rites of initiation from his room in Jonathan Edwards College next door. In our conversation he voiced a common-sensical distrust of power and privilege connected to secrecy. He has written that both Kerry and Bush should resign their Bones memberships because no president should have secrets he could never share with the American people. The polymathic Ron Rosenbaum writes the Edgy Enthusiast column in The New York Observer. His new book is an anthology of his own writing: Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism.

Starting with his still-breathtaking Esquire account of the 1960 Democratic convention that nominated John F. Kennedy in Los Angeles (Superman Comes to the Supermarket), Norman Mailer’s is an astonishing record of observation, invective, prophecy and lyricism–something of each mixed all together in one of many unforgettabable lines about JFK:

“Yes, this candidate,” Mailer wrote, “for all his record, his good, sound, conventional liberal record, has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz.”

This was the magazine piece that first filled out the vision of JFK as existential hero. On newsstands three weeks before election day, it probably rallied as many votes to the vaporous Kennedy margin as Mayor Daley’s graveyard precincts in Chicago did. It made a difference, and it is still must reading about American politics.

I’ve got a wicked new crush on this blue-eyed handsome shark forty-four years later. Mailer received me and nonpareil producer Mary McGrath at home in Provincetown last week to talk about the Bush Republicans in Madison Square Garden, where his rickety knees won’t let him track the story in person. The fruits of our conversation are here in five fat slices.

“The Democrats decided not to play their trump card, which is to play to the 50 percent of America that hates Bush. I think they may be saving it for later. I hope they are. If they ignore it, they’re losing their strength. But you can always count on the Democrats to do something anemic. Clinton did it. Jimmy Carter, with all his decency, did it. Democrats find a way to lose, even though they’re the majority party. They tend to listen too much to wonks. And wonks say to them: the thing to do is attack the center, get those center votes; prove to America you’re almost as conservative as George Bush. Allright, I don’t disagree with that as a strategy. But to pretend that he’s going to be more pro-war in Iraq than Bush–I found astonishing.”

Listen here:First, the risky New York setting; the dramatis personae on Bush’s stage (only Donald Rumsfeld gets Mailer’s respect); the great expectations set on the independent players–Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudoph Giuliani and John McCain; and the political value of stupidity.

Second, the “what it takes” question about Bushes in national politics, and Mailer’s take on the “loutish, low” son’s struggle with the father who couldn’t get himself reelected.

Third, a Mailer summing-up on “what had happened to American politics;” the wounds of the Cold War and the rise of corporations; and the very perishable grace of democracy itself.

Fourth, the prophetic novelist’s vision of the coming clash between Republican “crusade and mission” and the Democratic inclination to “do something anemic.”

Fifth, John Kerry, the Windsurfer, who learned to navigate the faintest breezes of politics without finding a cause he’d fight and die for. And, finally Mailer’s rueful speculation about the route that may have led from Hipdom in the 1950s to Abu Ghraib in a new century.

And hear, please, why we must honor this man. What Norman Mailer has written through the years (I have been wolfing down his 1280-page auto-anthology, The Time of Our Time) is an episodic history of misgivings about the free society we live in. To put it another way, we seem all to have arrived in this Bush-bedeviled summer of 2004 at what is for Norman Mailer a chronic nightmare. “A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve,” he wrote in his famous hipster essay, “The White Negro,” back in the halcyon days of 1959.

Some other timeless Mailer crystallizations along the way:

1960, on the Kennedy nomination: “Panic was the largest single sentiment in the breast of the collective delegates as they came to convene in Los Angeles… [Kennedy] looks young enough to be coach of the Freshman team, and that is not comfortable at all… So the boss is depressed, profoundly depressed. He comes to this convention resigned to nominating a man he does not understand, or let us say that, so far as he understands the candidate who is to be nominated, he is not happy about the secrets of his appeal, not so far as he divines these secrets; they seem to have little to do with politics and all too much to do with the private madnesses of the nation…”

1962, on the early rise of Conservatism, in a debate with William F. Buckley: “I think somewhere, at some debatable point in history, it is possible man caught some unspeakable illness of the psyche, that he betrayed some secret of his being and so betrayed the future of his species. I could not begin to trace the beginning of this plague, but whether it began early or late, I think it is accelerating now at the most incredible speed, and I would go so far as to think that many of the men and women who belong to the Right Wing are more sensitive to the disease than virtually any other people in this country. I think it is precisely this sensitivity that gives power to the Right Wing’s passions.”

1966, on LBJ at war in Vietnam: “The great fear that lies upon America is not that Lyndon Johnson is privately close to insanity so much as that he is the expression of the near insanity of most of us, and his need for action is America’s need for action–not brave action, but action, any kind of action, any move to get the motors going. A future death of the spirit lies close and heavy upon American life, a cancerous emptiness at the center which calls for a circus.”

1991, on the campaign politics of George H. W. Bush in 1988: “George Bush was keen, lean, competitive, and wanted the presidency as much as any vice president before him. Without it, he had nothing to anticipate but an enduring reputation as the ex-vice presidential wimp. Male pride is insufficiently appreciated. It can approach earthquake force. George Bush was not to be stopped by the likes of Dole or Dukakis; George Bush knew that you win elections by kissing the great American electorate on the mouth–‘I want a kinder, gentler nation’–and by kicking the opposition in the nuts.”

1996, on the unsatisfying choice between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, and on discovering that the ballot in Provincetown did not list Ralph Nader as an alternative: “Would America never have a major candidate to give again some promise that politics could become as great and exciting as our dream? There was something immeasurably insolent in the way politicians patronized the American heart. Marilyn Monroe once commented on the way strangers could be awfully rude to her. ‘I guess,’ she said, ‘when they say those things, they think they’re only doing it to your clothing.'”

1998, in his Foreword to The Time of Our Time: “So, yes, the question was alive–would greed and the hegemony of the mediocre–the media!–triumph over democracy?”

So, yes, Mailer is alive–a fearless shark indeed, tearing through the pretty pretenses of our public scene, bursting through the surface of his own words. Norman Mailer has been a celebrity since his mid-twenties, with the success of his war novel, The Naked and the Dead. Yet remarkably he has somehow remained a citizen, one of us, a dreamer, an idealist, a visionary and a regular genius in conversation at the bar. Listen in.